Cross-stitch roundup

When I got home from Carcassonne my crojo was screaming at me to crochet: I've bought Lucy of Attic24's Fireside blanket pack, and I was desperate to get it out and get started. BUT before I went away I had started a Hallowe'en stitch-along and I was determined to get it finished and not leave it languishing in the ever -growing UFO pile. As you'll see from this blog post I have form when it comes to not-completing cross-stitches. I definitely suffer from startitis - starting shiny new projects before the previous one is complete. So this past week I've been a very good stitcher and carried on with the stitch-along - I had gotten behind on the holiday week so I had lots to catch up on. Its the "Cabinet of Curiosities" stitchalong by Alyssa Westhoek of Stitchonomy - she has a pattern club of which I am a member, and for $8 a month you get access to all her patterns, and then several times a year she runs a free stitchalong, one of which is the Cabinet of Curiosities. Alyssa releases a little image pattern every day over a month or so and then you end up with something like this ...

Don't you love it ?! Aren't the little picture so cute ?! Which is your favourite ? Mine has to be either the brain in a jar - such fun!  or the phoenix feathers. Some of them are a little hard to tell what they are - frogs legs and mandrake I'm looking at you here, but I think most of them are fairly obvious. This cross-stitch is going to be framed and given to my all-things-Hallowe'en-loving son for his birthday.

Finishing this gave me such a sense of achievement I decided to root through the UFO pile and finish some more. So next is this wedding cross-stitch which I did for my cousin's wedding 5 YEARS AGO! I'm a terrible person. I never gave it to them (obvs seeing as it was incomplete). All I had to finish was the bits and piece hanging off the back of the car so the end was really nearly in sight. However when I got it out of the cupboard I found to my horror it's got a massive stain on it !!!! Noooo!!!I have no idea what it is (tea maybe?) or how it got there but I'm fairly sure after 5 years it won't be coming out any time soon, so I've decided to stitch over it with some green to make it look like grass below the car. So this one isn't quite done yet (though I did finish the bits and pieces at the bottom).

Next we have another wedding one. This time for friends of ours who got married 3 years ago. Can you see a pattern emerging here ? Honestly, I put so much work into these then sort of fall at the last hurdle. No idea why, but its really annoying. Anyway, I discovered that this one is actually complete so all it needs is framing and then it can be gifted to the lucky (?) couple.

Now we have a slightly smaller one, and again I found this one to be complete. Its a picture of Dornoch Cathedral, a cathedral in the highlands of Scotland and actually where Madonna and Elon Musk got married (but not to each other!). It's for my Mum for her birthday - Dornoch is the place where we spent our childhood holidays. We used to go every year with some other families from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland - we only all knew each other from going to the same hotel in Dornoch every year. Every summer  spent 2 weeks there, from when I was 5 until I was about 30 and I stopped going. My parents kept going though for another 20 odd years, until my Dad passed away. It was great fun, in the group there were about 20 children and we had a blissful time playing golf and tennis, going to the beach, swimming, playing in the hotel gardens, it was wonderfully freeing, and I feel very blessed to have grown up with such memories. So Dornoch is very dear to our hearts. The cross-stitch, small as it is, is very definitely recognisable as Dornoch Cathedral, so I know my Mum will love it. Again it just needs framing. (All this framing is going to cost  small fortune!)

This next one is actually just for myself, and I spent a few happy hours finishing it off this week. It's just a Christmas sampler which I started a few years ago. When I dug it out I realised there wasn't really a huge amount left to do - just from the sort of house shape downwards wasn't done, but the top 2/3 was all complete. I'm not sure what I'll do with this one, maybe get it framed and hang it up just at Christmas when we decorate the house.

And finally we have my ongoing project (excuse the creases!), which I may have blogged about before. This one is a real labour of love (and secretly I hate it a tiny bit ...). It's a Millenium cross-stitch which my Mum bought me for Christmas in the year of, yes, you guessed it, the millenium, back in 1999 (gosh that feels weird to write a year beginning with 19!). So I've been working on it, on and off, for 22 years! To be fair it has been packed in a box during two house moves and I've had 3 babies since then so life has had other priorities, but I dig it out every so often to work on it. I do feel now that the end is in sight. As you can see there are 16 little images and I've only got 3 left to do. So near yet so far!

Once this is finished its definitely getting framed and I might give it to my Mum for Christmas if I can finish it by then! We shall see!

So that's a roundup of my current cross-stitch progress. I still have a few incomplete ones but I shall leave those for another day.

Til next time, have some crafty fun,

Jillxxx